Game Boy Advance? It’s going to fail like a Richard Branson balloon.

There there, my dears.

PAGE 2

If you’ve been reading the games press recently, you can’t have failed to notice everyone getting terribly excited about the Game Boy Advance.

And rightly so – Nintendo’s new handheld is an amazingly cute little machine, the equivalent of having a SNES right in your pocket.

But hang on – a SNES in your pocket? In all the excitement, here’s a question no-one seems to have stopped to ask - what’s so great about that, exactly?

PAGE 3

Now don’t get me wrong, chums. I loved my SNES. Even if it had had no games whatsoever released for it except Super Mario World and Smash TV, it’d still have been a better games machine than the Mega Drive.

But the fact is, the SNES came out almost a decade ago. It’s ancient history, and as Namco or Hasbro will tell you, one thing today’s gamers are extremely reluctant to do is fork out good money for ancient history. Retro-gaming is quite popular, but only when it’s free via emulators and such.

PAGE 4

Game Boy Advance, however, is going to be a long way short of free. The gaming trade press is currently reporting that the cost of developing GBA games will be such that they’re likely to sell at prices of between £35 and £40.

In other words, exactly the same price as full-sized games for the Dreamcast, PS2, Xbox and Gamecube. Can you really see yourself being prepared to fork out the same money for a portable version of a 10-year-old SNES game as for Metal Gear Solid 2 or Gran Turismo 2000? Frankly, I just can’t picture it.

PAGE 5

My esteemed colleague T Mott said last week that it’ll be great to see people being able to develop 2D games again, and he’s right, it will. Journalists like he and I, largely sick of the same old 3D rubbish we’ve been fobbed off with over the last couple of years, will be delighted to see the purer, more abstract games that we love making a comeback, because we get them free.

But whether ordinary punters will be similarly delighted, and back up that delight with a heap of hard cash, is another kettle of sausages entirely.

PAGE 6

And here’s a thing – the GBA will to all intents and purposes be a handheld SNES. But there’s already been, for several years, a handheld Mega Drive. The Sega Nomad was released in Japan and America, and plays all existing Mega Drive games on a very high-quality screen. No-one was interested, and practically nobody bought one.

(And remember, if you want to play all your SNES games on GBA, you’re going to have to wait for Nintendo to write them, then buy them all over again. For £40 a time.)

PAGE 7

The Game Boy Advance itself will sell like hot cheese – I’ll be buying one purely to play my Game Boy games in the far more comfortable-to-hold horizontal format. But once everyone’s got one and bought their copy of Mario Kart (plus the inevitable Mario platformer and Pokemon game), I honestly can’t see them rushing out in 2001 to buy loads more SNES-type games at £40 a pop.

And if nobody buys GBA games, you can be sure that people will very swiftly stop producing them, as they’re currently doing with normal GB games.

PAGE 8

Game Boy games are already the most outrageously-overpriced software format ever, in terms of amount of code per quid. That’s why, apart from Pokemon (which is single-handedly responsible for the GB’s revival to an extent that’s impossible to exaggerate), GB games sell absolutely miniscule amounts of copies.